Approximately one seventh of the U.S. gross national product is weather sensitive, yet businesses lack adequate weather planning and analysis tools to make accurate short-term and long-range economic decisions. The National Weather Service data stream, which until recently was only available from a handful of companies with very restrictive and expensive redistribution policies, is now available via the NOAAPORT satellite feed. The massive flow of data is useless to decision makers without the ability to transform it into quantities relevant to their operations and visualize the data as useful information.
Weather forecasting technology and data volumes are increasing at a rapid pace. The trend is clearly toward improved forecast models and the availability of additional models, higher resolution models (made practical due to faster computers and decreasing computing costs) with huge increases in the resulting model output data, and additional satellite data sources with new and higher resolution images. Current approaches to weather decision support typically require direct participation or consulting by trained meteorologists and are expensive, piecemeal and chaotic—unable to correlate the variety of weather information sources that are needed for business decisions. Even professional meteorologists increasingly need tools to deal with the growing complexity and volume of the available data.
There are a wide variety of tools meteorologists currently use for their weather forecasting and tracking needs. For example, there are several “storm tracker” systems available that use real-time data to chart the progress of a storm in terms of intensity, precipitation, movement, and direction as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,717,589, 6,018,699, 6,275,774, 6,125,328, 6,339,747, and 6,401,039. U.S. Pat. No. 6,351,218 shows the use of such mapped storm track data as part of a system for activating weather-warning sirens.
Three-dimensional presentation of real-time radar weather information is well known and described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,379,215, 5,583,972 and 6,266,063. Examples of weather simulation systems that generate simulated three-dimensional “out-the-window” photographic-like representations of predicted weather data at a given location are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,409,379, 5,480,305 and 5,630,718. U.S. Pat. No. 6,052,648 combines a real-time three-dimensional weather representation with a video image of a weather forecaster for television weather broadcasts. Examples of weather information systems that utilize digital camera and video images of local areas to make measurements of and/or disseminate real time weather observations are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,208,938 and 6,269,309.
Examples of selective audio playback and alphanumeric and chart-type displays of weather information from different weather reporting stations are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,568,385 and 5,848,378. U.S. Pat. No. 5,517,193 shows an example of a weather information processing system that present different types of weather data in different windows within a graphical user interface. A system for distributing graphic and audio weather information to a local user over a cell phone is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,343,255. U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,378 describes a system for collecting and disseminating weather information as audio information over the phone or as alphanumeric data values over the Internet. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,356,843 and 6,405,134 describe examples of systems that are used to graphically display one particular kind of weather data, such as lightening data or wind shear data.
Examples of systems that utilize commercially available sources of forecast weather data to assist in business decision-making are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,491,629, 5,521,813, 5,796,932, 6,397,163 and 6,442,554. U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,307 describes a weather forecasting system that attempts to use the best model to make a forecast for a selected location based on a time until an activity.
While all of these systems provide helpful ways of receiving and utilizing weather information, almost all of these systems offer little control to the end-user as to how the weather information will be organized and presented. One of the reasons for this is the challenge that is encountered when trying to simultaneously present multiple sources or types of weather data. In addition to the inherent problems in trying to collate different types of data in different formats from different providers, none of the real time weather data sources provide weather information updates on a common time basis. For example, most radar data is provided continuously in real time or with a delay of few minutes, whereas meteorological readings such as temperature, wind, precipitation, humidity and the like are provided on periodic intervals, such as every hour or every quarter hour or even daily.
Even in the context of presenting the same type of weather information, such as radar data, the problem of lack of a common time frame for the weather data still presents a challenging problem. U.S. Pat. No. 6,266,063 recognizes the problems of attempting to combine weather radar data from different radar sources that have different refresh periods. In this patent, NEXRAD radar information that is updated only once every five to six minutes is combined with continuous real time Doppler radar images by setting a heartbeat interval for updating the timing of presentation of video images for a television weather forecast. The heartbeat interval of this system is essentially a least common denominator that is set at a period of once every five minutes. In this way, both sets of radar information can be simultaneously displayed in a common time frame, but that time frame is limited to the update resolution of the slowest updating information source.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,360,172 presents a system for customizing natural phenomenological information to an end user's (subscriber's) specifications and needs by gathering raw data from several different sources, such as weather radar, NWS, and NOAA and synthesizing the information into something that can be transmitted to the user. The user must specify what types of weather measurements (what geographic area, precipitation, wind speed, temperature, etc) and also what form of transmissions are desired. For instance, if the user's device is a telephone voice mail, the transmission will be in the form of a spoken text message. If the device is a pager or PDA, the transmission will be text receivable on the device. his is accomplished by filtering all the raw weather data by the users' specifications and only presenting the information desired in a personal text message format on the media desired. While this invention is effective in presenting information from many different meteorological data sources as text data, there is no capability for handling graphical meteorological information.
While existing systems and techniques for presenting and combining weather-related information are adequate for well-defined applications where there is little need for user-based customization or manipulation of the weather-related information, there is a continuing need for better tools and techniques for the presentation and combination of weather-related information and especially graphical meteorological information.